I have to say, that the video manipulation program FFMPEG, which very powerful, is not very user-friendly when it comes to installation. While many Linux programs can be happily installed from either a pre-compiled package, or downloading source and compiling yourself, this isn't necessarily the case with FFMPEG. The ease of FFMPEG installation largely depends on how many different video codecs and containers you want to be able to input or output. The greater the number, the exponential increase in installation difficulty. My main need was for FFMPEG to accept a wide range of input formats, while outputting H.264 encoded QuickTime (MOV) files. Here's how I achieved this on a Debian Etch server........

Full How-To at:

http://slashdot.org/~PhillC/journal/190325